Eastern Europeans would probably disagree that the threat Stalin posed to democracy was “overhyped.” Regardless, that has nothing to do with the fact that going to the wall to defend people who were absolutely guilty of what they were accused of was an absurd thing to do.
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Replying to @JamesSurowiecki
Cold War liberals did not just claim Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was wrong or that Hiss/Julius Rosenberg were guilty. They also claimed there was an international communist movement threat to take over the world & domestic spying was major problem in 1950s. Both wrong
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Replying to @HeerJeet
We can argue over the definition of "major," but the fact that Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, the Silvermaster ring, and Hiss were all funneling information (and, in White's case, printing plates) to the USSR was undeniably a problem.
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Replying to @JamesSurowiecki
All the major spy rings were broken by Verona. By the time of Truman's loyalty oaths and McCarthyism all you had was security theatre (not unlike post-9/11) for an overwhelmingly phantom threat.
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Replying to @gmukunda @JamesSurowiecki
States normally spy on each other -- the United States, for example, spies on Angela Merkel. Not a good idea to turn such spying into justification for loyalties oaths and purges that cost thousands of innocent people their jobs, as Truman did.
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Replying to @gmukunda @JamesSurowiecki
"We're the good guys so it's okay when we do it" is a principle of nationalism, not a rational way to think about foreign policy.
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Right, but Germans manage to counter USA spying without the extraordinary hysteria and security theater that Truman whipped up. The decision to make spying a pretext for a social purge wasn't a matter of security.
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